Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.

GNOME 3 Fallback is the same as GNOME 2 and unlike GNOME 2 is actually still being developed (although admittedly there's not a lot of developers working with it).

The Mate developer would be much better off making Fallback better. It's a lot less work to maintain gnome-panel and some applets than all of GNOME. And by working with upstream instead of against it, his work would automagically get into all the distributions and he could use the official bug tracker and git repository.

The main thing that needs to be done is that most applets just need to be ported to the new GTK3 GNOME Panel library. (The 20 or so standard applets have already been done.)